How to improve your child’s handwriting? is a problem faced by many parents. Parents always look for ways and tips to improve handwriting of their children. How to improve children’s penmanship always bothers parents.

Some children may have writing difficulties. How to help children with writing difficulties or with messy handwritings? This article will discuss the solution to that query.

Parents frequently ask me for advice on how to increase their children’s handwriting speed, increase their writing speed during examinations, or simply how to write quickly and legibly. Writing is not a competition. You require strong hand-brain coordination to write quickly. Even if you manage to write quickly, if your handwriting is poor, the result will be writing that is difficult to read or comprehend. This is a typical issue with kids.

How to Improve your child’s handwriting

The way your write on paper is called handwriting. Everyone has unique and different styles. A child’s handwriting skills are one of the most important aspects of their development. In addition to expressing themselves, writing allows them to communicate with the world around them. A good handwriting always creates a positive impact about you and attract people to read your writings.

3 Steps to Improve your child’s handwriting

1st Step : PHYSICAL ASPECT

GRIP, POSITION AND MOTOR SKILLS

GRIP :

It is extremely important to grip your writing tool with a comfortable grip without applying pressure to your hand or ankle. The thumb be pressed together with the index finger while the middle finger supports it.

Grip your writing tool as comfortably as possible. When writing for too long, pressure on the wrist or ankle can cause problems in the future, as well as ruining your writing experience and causing your child to become disinterested in writing. This can eventually lead to poor handwriting and loss of interest in writing.

Pencil gripper is great tool to use to help kids to cross their fingers over one another.

POSITION :

Make sure your child sits comfortably before starting to write. You can help your child correct his or her writing posture by providing him or her with a comfortable table and chair with back support. It’s easier to harm yourself rather than improve when you practice lying down or in an uneven stance.

MOTOR SKILLS :

Motor Skills is the coordination of different small muscle of hand, arm and eye while writing letters. You can improve your motor skills by performing non=writing actives. Such as cutting paper with scissors to make paper flower. Skip a stone, making a paper airplane or other thing with paper.

DEXTERITY :

The ability to use one’s hands skillfully when doing something is Dexterity. To achieve good handwriting, you need to improve your hand dexterity, finger control and coordination of your eyes.

2nd Step : PRACTICE

Handwriting is an art form. It is a skill that can be acquired through practice. Practice is the best way for your child to improve his or her handwriting. The only way to make your child’s handwriting better is to have them practice. Start out by practicing letter tracing.  This way you can show your child how letter should look.

Every letter is designed in a specific way and should be written in that way maintaining proportionate size, width and maintaining appropriate distance so as to be called good handwriting.

Here are few tips & activities to improve handwriting :

☑️ Always sit up straight. Sitting position can have large effort on your penmanship. Relax your shoulders and start writing.

☑️ A worksheet or highlighter marker can be used to mark a specific area of paper, and you can encourage your kid to write inside that marked area as another visual intervention.

☑️ Use pencil grippers. Pencil gripper is great tool to use to help child to so that they do not cross their fingers over one another.

☑️ The next important tips are to focus on lower case letters. Upper case letters can be harder to form as you need multiple pencil lifts and majority use two or more stokes. Upper Case “E” for example, uses four separate strokes, whereas lower case “e” uses one continuous stroke, making it more efficient to form. Lower case letters account for about 95% of all letters in writing. It is therefore essential to teach child the letters that they need the most, and not to overwhelm then with learning both upper and lower case simultaneously. Once child have mastered all their lower case, only then should upper case be introduced.

☑️ Letter spacing – The space between the words and letters should not be congested. There should be some finger spacing between each word.

☑️ Avoid overwrite and tangles – while writing the letters should not be joined with one another. Each and every letter of the word must have some space between it.

☑️ Always try to keep the slants consistent. Writing on a paper highlighted by a marker as discussed above can make your child’s handwriting consistent and straight.

☑️ Always avoid excess pressure while writing. A tight grip results in cramped handwriting. Always hold and grip the pencil or pen comfortably. Neither too tight nor too loose. This results in a smooth handwriting.

☑️ Practice Drills daily – Drills are a set of activities which can be performed by children to improve their handwriting. Here are some of the drills recommended by me.

☑️ Pattern Tracing activities – pattern tracing books are available which consists of squares, triangles, circles, hexagonal etc.

☑️ Letter or numeric tracing activities

☑️ After practicing with tracing, it’s time to draw and write free hand on paper. Start with parallel lines, horizontal lines, slanting lines, circles, triangles square etc.

☑️ Now practice with letters both capital and small and numbers.

☑️ Animals, Birds, and other creatures tracing books can also help you master your grip and your coordination of different small muscle of hand, arm and eye.

☑️ Practice pangram. What is a pangram? A pangram is a unique sentence a phrase in which every letter of the alphabet is used at least once.

Let’s see an example for the pangram.

the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

In this sentence we have all the 26 letters of the alphabet. If we practice this pangram, we can be able to get good practice of the all the alphabets.

Let’s see more pangram –

The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

There are lots of pangrams out there.

Sixty zippers were quickly picked from the woven jute bag.

You can try your favorite one.

You can download free letter tracing eBook or handwriting books for tracing.

Suggested letter tracing practicing books available in Amazon :

Suggested coloring practicing books available in Amazon :

Evaluation and feedback :

Allow your child to create a brief paragraph using 100 or 200 words. You analyze that passage to identify the issue your child is having. You, as a parent or teacher, must pinpoint the precise issue your child is facing.

Closely observe your child while they are writing, and to provide immediate feedback to correct errors as they occur.

When child practice without supervision, they often form the letters incorrectly, which can lead to bad habits.

Providing feedback after the work is completed, is definitely not as effective as point it when they are done.

Several issues that are linked to children’s untidy handwriting or writing difficulties :

☑️ Struggling with writing

☑️ Wrong grip

☑️ Uneven letter sizing

☑️ Letter and word spacing

☑️ Inconsistency writing words

☑️ Sentence slanting in wrong direction.

Struggling with writing can be due to bad motor skills or bad writing position. You can easily rectify by following step 1 above.

Efficient grip is very important in consistency of your child’s handwriting. For effective and efficient griping of your writing tool please look in step 1 above.

Uneven letter sizing and letter spacing can only be solved by practicing especially with letter tracing practice book. Practice can bring uniformity and consistency in your child’s handwriting.

3rd Step : MAKE WRITING FUN| FUN WAYS TO IMPROVE HANDWRITING

The most important is to make writing a fun. A happy and fun environment plays a huge role in child’s growth. Make sure the environment is ideal and actively engages the youngster if you want to make writing time enjoyable and interesting. Your youngster will find the entire procedure much more pleasurable since they will view it as a game rather than as work. Without joy and excitement, it will become repetitive and you won’t attain the desired outcome.

Invest in good supplies. Invest in good colors, pencils, crayons, writing and tracing books, it will go long way in attaining your objectives.

Few tips to make writing fun –

☑️ Children loves colors. Give your child a color pencil, crayons to write on.

☑️ Engages them with world puzzles, anagrams, book of mazes.

☑️ Drawing can be fun. Let your child draw and put his or her imagination on paper.

☑️ Handwriting based games and fun drawing tracing books.

All these activities will make handwriting fun and excitement.

Strategies to improve handwriting

ENCOURAGEMENT

☑️ Your child will perform better with your positive support.

☑️ Your positive encouragement will surely help your kid.

CONFIDENCE

☑️ Your child may experience writing difficulties.

☑️ Parent’s and teacher should support the child which will increase his or her self-confidence.

FOCUS

☑️ Children gets easily distracted if they don’t find the task interesting.

☑️ Always encourage your child to focus on task ahead with some challenges or some incentives.

Following these steps will definitely improve your child’s handwriting.

Read More : Balenciaga apologises for childrens campaign featuring bondage teddy bears

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CHILD'S HANDWRITING|[1 Free Tracing ebook] HOW TO HELP CHILDREN WITH WRITING DIFFICULTIES https://t.co/CxjaeMHYg8

— HDNewslive (@HDNewslive) September 4, 2023

FAQ

Question : What are the 4 stages of handwriting development?

Answer : The Three Stages to Learning Handwriting

Stage 1 – Pre-handwriting Patterns.

Stage 2 –Letter Formation.

Stage 3 – Joining letters to form a word sentence.

Stage 4 – Joining word to form a sentence.

Question : What are the steps to improve handwriting?

Answer : Here’s what I learned:

☑️ Always sit up straight.

☑️ Use worksheet to practice.

☑️ Problem griping pencil use pencil gripper

☑️ Start practice with lower letters.

☑️ Space between letters and word should not be congested.

☑️ Avoid overwrite and tangles.

☑️ Always try to keep the slants consistent and straight.

☑️ Avoid tight grip and excess pressure on writing tools.

☑️ Practice Drills daily – Pattern Tracing, Letter and numeric tracing, upper case and lowercase letter writing drills

☑️ Practice pangram.

☑️ Make a habit to write a poem or stories daily. Such practices if done regularly can improve handwriting drastically.

Question : What are the 3 kinds of handwriting?

Answer :

☑️ Cursive

☑️ Modern Cursive

☑️ Print

Question : How can I improve my child’s handwriting?

Answer : Ways to Improve Your Child’s Handwriting

☑️ Pattern Tracing activities – practice with pattern tracing books.

☑️ Letter or numeric tracing practice.

☑️ Practicing parallel lines, horizontal lines, slanting lines, circles, triangles square etc.

☑️ Practice with letters both capital and small including numbers.

☑️ Animals, Birds, and other creatures tracing books can also help you with improving handwriting.

Question : What is a pangram?

Answer : A pangram is a unique sentence a phrase in which every letter of the alphabet is used at least once.